Losses May 15, 2012 TTNP LOSS On paper so far we’ve lost more than half our money on this one — which is no problem, because we only bought it (at $1.77) with money we could truly afford to lose — but at least one analyst thinks the game’s not over yet. He’s initiated coverage of the stock with a target of $4. Read it here. MEMORY LOSS – I Governor Romney has no recollection of the event his prep school classmates find searingly memorable — which may or may not say something about the Governor. (Charles Blow in the New York Times: “There is so much wrong with Governor Romney’s response that I hardly know where to start. . . .“) But however much or little significance you attach to his “prank,” and to its having made no lasting impression on him, you’ve got to admit this song is a heck of a good Sondheim adaptation — “The Demon Barber of Wall Street.” MEMORY LOSS – II Governor Romney was clear about his memory loss. Contrast that with the way the Romney campaign is trying to claim a memory loss President Obama never had. As explained here in the Washington Post: No, Obama didn’t admit he `forgot’ about recession By Greg Sargent The Romney campaign and some on the right are having a grand old time blasting Obama for supposedly saying late yesterday that he ”forgot” about the recession. Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul claims Obama has “now admitted that he’s forgotten about the recession.” This is an absurd distortion. But it’s worth dwelling on, because it says an enormous amount about what this presidential campaign is all about. Here’s Obama’s actual quote, courtesy of Buzzfeed’s video: << It was a house of cards, and it collapsed in the most destructive worst crisis that we’ve seen since the great depression. And sometimes people forget the magnitude of it , you know? And you saw some of that I think in the video that was shown. Sometimes I forget. In the last six months of 2008, while we were campaigning, nearly three million of our neighbors lost their jobs. Eight hundred thousand lost their jobs in the month that I took office. And it was tough. But the American people proved they were tougher. >> The Romney campaign’s response: << It’s not surprising that a president who forgot to create jobs, forgot to cut the debt, and forgot to change Washington has now admitted that he’s forgotten about the recession. In fact, it seems that the President has forgotten that he’s been in office for the last three-and-a-half years. In November, the American people won’t forget. >> What Obama actually said, of course, is that sometimes he forgets about the magnitude of the crisis that hit before he took office and continued into the early months of his term. The irony here is really rich: It’s actually the Romney campaign that is heavily invested in getting voters to forget the magnitude of the crisis Obama inherited. The Romney statement above captures this perfectly. The claim that Obama “forgot to create jobs” is supposed to mean that a net total of zero jobs were created on Obama’s watch. This assertion rests on a metric that factors in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs that were lost while the economy was in free fall during Obama’s first few months in office, before his policies took effect, and blames Obama for those early job losses. Romney has used this metric for months. It’s central to his whole case against Obama. Watch the Obama campaign’s latest ad, and you’ll see that the conflict of job data interpretations displayed above is what this campaign is all about. The ad — like Obama’s comments yesterday — stresses the long view, the awfulness of the meltdown, and the two dozen months of private sector job creation that followed. Romney wants you to forget this recent history. His whole candidacy is based on an amnesia strategy: It is premised on the hope that voters either will forget about the severity and depth of the crisis Obama inherited, or won’t factor it into their decision this fall, and will instead hold Obama responsible for the sluggish pace of the recovery. And yet the Romney campaign is now accusing Obama of forgetting about the recession. Just perfect. HACKED Whirled Pixels worked overtime this weekend getting my page back up. (If you missed yesterday’s column or Friday’s, just click here or here.) Luann writes: “One thing that might be good to mention to your readers, because some browsers hold on tightly to the site pages they’ve cached, would be to delete their browser cache if they think they see any issues. I’ve found Safari to be particularly stubborn about really refreshing a page after it’s been updated.”